Helmut Jahn was born in Nuremberg in 1940.
From 1960 to 1965 he trained at the Technische Hochschule in Munich,
after which he emigrated to the U.S. where he spent a year at the
Illinois Institute of Technology studying under Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe. In 1967 he joined the office of C.F. Murphy Associates and six
years later became partner and Director of Design. The practice was
renamed Murphy/Jahn in 1981.

During the 1960s the firm designed some of
the more distinguished buildings in Chicago using a vocabulary of
Miesian geometry. In later works Jahn's rigid adherence to pure
Modernist doctrine lessened as he began to embrace an architectural
philosophy which stressed the intuitive nature of creative rationalism.
This shift led to a more flexible approach to design and signalled a
decisive break with the unchallenged ideology of the Modernist past.

Using a "variable, wide-ranging
architectural language" to describe a buildings' contextual
relationship, Jahn generated a symbolic code which could be appreciated
by both professional architects and the general public.